Artist Statement
Dispersion of people from continued cultural and familial connections initiates an ongoing discourse that is shaped by trajectory of experiences. Material practices can be examined in new ways shifting how diaspora forge a relational dialogue with respect to communities and places in different surroundings where they have settled. My creative practice and research through clay, textile, performance, and public participation, investigate how culturally inscribed traditional rituals performed by women within the South Asian diaspora are (re)imagined into contemporary art encounters. Material practices of Tamil women originating from Sri Lanka and South India inform the creative works. Rituals serve as enactments of cultural and gender identity to generate connections for diaspora through material and social dialogical processes of continuity and change. The viewer is invited to enter a place of encounter as threshold crossings.
Drape and gestural acts of ritual in hybrid material of ceramic and textile forms capture the
embodiment of women from the diaspora. Confluence of cultural traditions of those that inhabit boundaries are expressed as markings of textile and vivid pigments, in clay. Unravelling of thread, the tear, inlay in fractures, movement of form, bleeding of the design, abstraction, and superimposition of textile design, not only become decorative elements that articulate the transformation of the traditional culture but also conveys the tension, fragility and flux of expression.
Material agency articulates new ways to experience liminality, flux, impermanence, and re-
assemblage. Artworks as durational socially engaged making of clay artefacts and participatory actions convey the transformative states of the tangible and intangible that accompany displacement and establishing of new relational connections that integrate the people and lands of origins with those settled. The creative works understand these as iterations of making and dismantling of processes that emerge within migrant journeys.
